1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to managing information storage between two or more computers and specifically to remedying computer fail-over conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many commercial businesses and enterprises make extensive use of personal computers (PCs) in their daily operations. Typically, each user of a PC in the enterprise has a networked PC at his/her desk or work area. As the number of networked computer systems utilized in an enterprise increases, the management of resources in the network may become increasingly complex and expensive. Some of the manageability issues involved in maintaining a large number of networked computer systems may include ease of installation and deployment, the topology and physical logistics of the network, asset management, scalability (the cost and effort involved in increasing the number of units), troubleshooting network or unit problems, support costs, software tracking and management, as well as the simple issue of physical space, be it floor space or room on the desktop, as well as security issues regarding physical assets, information protection, software control, and computer virus issues.
Many of these issues may be addressed by centralizing the locations of the PCs, such as by installing multiple PCs into a central frame or cabinet, and locating each PC's human interface (e.g., keyboard, monitor, mouse, etc.) at a respective remote location, e.g., more than 10 or 20 feet from the computing system. In one approach, each computer in the system may be a “computer on a card”, also referred to as a computer blade or “blade”. In other words, the computing system may be comprised on a circuit card which may include standard computing system components such as a CPU, memory, power supply, and network interface, as well as an extender, e.g., a PCI extender, for communicating with the remote human interface. In a typical networked computer system, the hard drive is often one of the least reliable components. Due to the constant use of the hard drive, and the reliance of the user on the information and application programs stored on the hard drive, a failure of the hard drive may have catastrophic effects. Additionally, when the number of computers and respective hard drives in the networked system becomes very large, the occurrence of a hard drive failure becomes increasingly probable, i.e., the mean time between failures decreases as the number of drives in the system increases.
Information redundancy is generally used to prevent irretrievable loss of information in the event of a hard drive or computer failure. For example, a variety of approaches may be based on the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), where information on one disk drive are replicated on other disk drives so that in the event of a failure the information of the original drive may be rebuilt or restored from the other disk drives. However, these systems typically rely on central storage management, such as a dedicated server computer that monitors and controls the storage, backup, and retrieval process among the networked computers. Thus, there are particular points of failure that may lead to catastrophic losses of information or functionality in the system. In many cases, there may even be a single point of failure, such as the managing server, whose failure may jeopardize the entire system.
Thus, improved systems and methods for managing information storage between a plurality of computers are desired.